How to Move Your Site from Joomla to WordPress

A lot of people use Joomla to manage and publish their websites. While Joomla is a good platform, it is definitely not for everyone. Maybe you are among those users who have decided that you want to switch from Joomla to WordPress. You have heard a lot of people talking about WordPress and it’s ease of use. You want to utilize the power of WordPress plugins and themes. Well if you want to migrate your Joomla site to WordPress, then you are in the right place. In this article, we will show you how to move your site from Joomla to WordPress.

After activating the plugin, go to Tools » Import. You will see a list of import tools available for your WordPress installation. Click on Joomla (FG) from the list of available tools.

Now you have reached the Joomla Importer for WordPress page. On this page, you need to provide your Joomla website and database information.

You can get the database settings from your Joomla website’s administration area, under Global Configuration » Server tab. This information is also stored in configuration.php file in your Joomla website’s root folder. You can access this file by connecting to your website using an FTP client and opening configuration.php in a text editor like notepad.

After providing your database information scroll to “Behavior”. If you want to import media files such as images from Joomla to WordPress make sure that you have checked Force media import option. Finally click on “Import content from Joomla to WordPress” button.

The plugin will run a script and start importing your content from Joomla to WordPress. Depending on how much content you have, the import process may take some time. Once it is completed you will see a notice like this:

Once you have imported all your content from Joomla into WordPress, the next step is to fix all broken internal links. Scroll down to the bottom of the Joomla (FG) importer page and click on Modify internal links button.

Troubleshooting Joomla to WordPress Import

If you see database connection errors then you need to recheck your database settings and make sure you are using correct login credentials.

Sometimes importing media may not work because your web host may have disabled allow_url_fopen directive in php.ini.

We hope that this article helped you move your site from Joomla to WordPress. If you need help, you will find plenty of tutorials in our archives. WPBeginner is the largest free WordPress tutorials site for beginners, and we are excited for you to join the WordPress community.

70 Comments

I am very new to this field. I want to transfer my joomla website to wordpress. I have 3 domains parked on 1 hosting. When I installed wordpress for one of my domain which was working on joomla already, other website started working strangely.
Can anyone assist me what should I do to use wordpress in place of joomla.

I am completely new in this field. I find one classified template on Joomla. and its almost related to my requirement. they using plugins for DJ-monster.

I am new on this. I want to start my classified web business on wordpress using woocommerece. can I use joomla classified template offline in my laptop and then transfer it in to wordpress or not. with DJ-monster plugins.

this is the joomla template which i want to use.

please your answer and guidelines will make life easier. as I am only the one person who investing limited budget on this business.

I plan on moving my site from Joomla to WP but most pages on the Joomla site has a .html extension on the end of the URL.

From my research it seems that it’s hard or not possible for WordPress pages to have .html extensions, only posts.

Is there a way around this or should I just migrate the content and create the pages without the .html extension on the URL? I’m scared this will effect rankings and will take some time to get indexed by Google.

thanks for the article…I have, on the Joomla site, a customized theme/template…(home page)…Not sure of the correct term…I am assuming that I have to select or create a WP theme on the fresh WP site and that the import process will fit what it can and that I will have to make “adjustments” to get it all into WP?
Is there a particular step to prepare for receiving content that was in the customized theme on Joomla? Ta

WordPress comes with a couple default themes pre-installed. The latest of the default themes will be automatically activated on your site when you install WordPress. You can import content from your Joomla site and then adjust or change your WordPress theme.

I was install wordpress on mydomain/dir and completely import content from Joomla using FG joomla to wordpress plugin. My question, how to move all content and database to public directory?
Did you have article about it?
Thanks before

Again, might be a silly question but I am new-ish to WP. I have my site all migrated and set up with content (mostly) as I want it for now. Moved my old joomla site to a protected folder on the same server just in case I should ever need to refer to it again.

Now my plugin manager keeps bugging me that there is a new version of the Joomla to WordPress available. But I shouldn’t need that, right? I’m all done with it. Can I delete the plugin without messing with the data it migrated for me?

I read in the previous comments that it’s better to have a new database when migrating on the same server. But what does it mean? If my host only provide me with one database, I’ll buy another and when I install wordpress in a new directory I give the details of the new database and when migrating joomla I give the joomla database code in the plugin. Thoses database are completely independent aren’t they? Then I move up the wordpress directory at the root and I’m done? All my content will have gone on my new database won’t it?

By doing that, assuming I have kept the same domain name, I guess only my wordpress site will be live, but what about the old links that are still visible on google? Don’t I risk a duplicate content and be blacklisted? i’m a bit confused..
Thanks !

If you have joomla installed on the location where you would want to install WordPress then the best way to go is to create a new directory and then install WordPress in that directory. Once you have successfully migrated your Joomla site you can change your Domain’s settings to point to to the directory where WordPress is installed.

Please say that you have some similar method to move Drupal site to WordPress! ! !
I manage the Drupal site with simple membership content. When users register they can download some PDF files. I have a database of users with just main informations about them and that is all. So I would like to move the site with all members data to the WordPress. Could somebody tell me there is a easy way to do it? :o)

Hello, I have a question, mabye stupid but i really don’t know how this works. I want to move a joomla site on a wordpress platform (on the same server). I have to create a new database and user for wordpress, or do i use the same database and user?
Thank you very much!

Hi, Thanks for the article it was great,
I just have a question, maybe is obvious, but you didn’t mention if this IMPORT, do not ERASE all that information from your actual Joomla site? Because I has been working on a WordPress Demo page, and I don’t want to erase anything from my original Joomla site… just make a copy of the content and images…
Thanks in advance for your answer…
Jimrelay

Thank you for the article!, but i wanted to know how would we convert the theme from joomla to wordpress, we want to keep the design as well including navigation, sidebar, content each and everything. Basically it will look like the same website but with a different CMS in the background.

I have just completed moving my website from Joomla to WordPress. I problably spent 30+ hours getting it perfect, testing, ensuring there are no 404 errors.

Problems I found were:
-Needed to perform the migration on a local host to ensure as the URL structure would stuff up.
-Image redirects will result in 404 errors (which I manually had to change – only effects those -images ranking high on Google Image or those evil hot linkers.
-Comments needed to be migrated

Hi Jack
How did you migrate the comments over? I did my site a few years back and didn’t manage to migrate the comments but now I have to do our corporate intranet and it’s important that the comments get moved over too.

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